Ouroboros
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Date
2019
Authors
Bdair, Rema’
Afanah, Ban
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
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Abstract
Ouroboros is a tourism app that focuses on the cultural value of tourism.
It helps provide users with what is similar to real touring experiences by
giving them the ability of exploring places using the Augmented Reality
technology (AR). These places can be currently existing ones or the past
status of others. In addition to showing the views, the app gives relative
information about them which can vary from construction information
to social values.
This app is mainly aimed to show people how certain views they pass
by have been changed or even have gone. As seen from the developers'
perspective, getting to see something in the eye is more enjoyable and
benefitable than reading its history. It also makes it easier for curious
explorers who do not get to exist in a certain place to be as much close
to it as possible. Furthermore, the application is, for the meantime, ded-
icated to the city of Nablus in Palestine.
Some projects in the field of re-creating places from the past have been
conducted, but none of them, until the time this report has been done,
managed to be on apps stores. On the other hand, there are some AR
applications and services available for plenty of users to give real time
information of what they need like the AR Mode in Google Maps. How-
ever, none of these apps have the two features of showing the current or
the past statuses at the same time.
The process of developing this app starts with manually collecting data
consisted of photos and general information of famous places in Nablus
like Tell-Balata. This data is processed to generate 3D models of the
views that are, then, developed using the Unity engine to build AR ob-
jects. The whole experience the app provides is implemented to
deliver an Android application using Android Studio.
Ouroboros is available on the web, too for an additional feature for users,
which gives them the chance of tracking themselves in a tour and saves
their memories.